Japan’s ‘Science Women’ Seek an Identity

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Junko Tsuchiyagaito, center, at lunch with two fellow chemistry students. She does not usually tell others that she studies chemistry at the graduate level.CreditCreditNadia Shira Cohen for the International Herald Tribune

By Miki Tanikawa

June 16, 2013

TOKYO — When she meets people off campus, Junko Tsuchiyagaito, 23, does not usually let on that she studies chemistry at the graduate level. She does not deliberately withhold the information, but she does not volunteer it, either.

She said that Japanese women who studied the humanities were seen as being more polished and attractive, especially at Aoyama Gakuin University, which is known for its fashionable student body. “But the image of women in science is that of someone whose hair is disheveled and who does not care about beauty. Men think you are not cute.”

The widely shared perception that studying science could be the kiss of death for a young Japanese woman’s romantic life is one of several causes behind the low ratio of female students in science and engineering departments.

According to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, women accounted for 14 percent of the science and engineering students at Japanese universities, even though they represented 43 percent of college students over all, excluding medical and agricultural schools. In the humanities, they make up 66 percent.

Voices are now growing within both government and academia to rectify the imbalance.

“With the population shrinking, we need to tap into women in order to generate capable engineers in the future,” said Toshio Maruyama, executive vice president for education and international affairs at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, or TiTech, one of the leading science schools in Japan. “That is our common perception.”

TiTech and other universities are pushing to increase female enrollment by attracting high school girls and their parents with science-themed fairs, workshops, campus tours and lab visits. Some send young women currently enrolled in science and technology courses across the country as ambassadors.

The topic of women entering these fields has suddenly become fashionable. They even have a nickname: “Rikejo,” roughly meaning “science women.” Publishers print magazines for young women interested in science, and there is even a novel about a “mathematics girl.”

Masao Togami, editor of Rikejo magazine, a free publication with 17,000 subscribers, said he wanted to give young women encouragement, career tips and a vision for the future. “Universities have been strengthening efforts to recruit more female students,” Mr. Togami said. “That’s clearly evident just in the last few years.”

“Rikejo fairs” aimed at high school girls have become popular. When TiTech announced campus and lab tours online last year, the slot for about 30 students “was gone in one minute,” said a university official. “We wish we could let in more.”

The tide turned around 2008, when the government began subsidized programs to support scientific research conducted by female scientists and increased funding to help universities employ more of them, said Ginko Kawano, associate professor of social education at Yamagata University.

The government is especially concerned that only 13 percent of Japanese scholars and researchers are women, which is a lower proportion than in Europe, the United States and South Korea. In the science fields in Japan, that percentage falls to almost half of that figure; it is only about 2 percent in engineering.

Many university science departments, particularly those in the countryside, are trying to recruit more young women, some even frantically. “Many universities cannot fill their capacity because youth population is declining,” Ms. Kawano said. “So they are turning to the population segment that was previously not thought to be their customers: women.”

Female students, some professors say, perform better academically and also have an easier time finding jobs after graduation.

Miki Hasegawa, a chemistry professor at Aoyama Gakuin University’s campus in Sagamihara, a city near Tokyo, said men might have solid academic records in grades and test scores, “but the ones with sprouting talents and abilities often are women.”

“In our field, a little bit of playfulness and risk taking is necessary to succeed. In that sense, women are more flexible and daring.”

But the notion that science and engineering are not for women, and that studying these fields could wreak havoc on their love lives, runs deep.

When Naoto Ohtake, now an engineering professor at TiTech, began studying there in 1982, “There were zero females, and it had been historically zero throughout its 100-year history,” he said. “The notion was that touching machines wasn’t for ladies.” Today, about 6 percent of TiTech’s mechanical engineering students are women.

Mr. Togami of Rikejo magazine said that some saw these women as being too intellectually intimidating for Japanese men. “Scientific women are thought to be smart, logical and cannot be easily fooled,” he said.

“Men don’t like it when women defeat their arguments in a logical way,” said Ai Takaoka, 23, who studies ecological science at Tokyo Metropolitan University. A fellow science major, Naoko Kono, 21, noted that Japanese men wanted girlfriends who followed their lead. “They like ladies who have a soft character and are agreeable,” she said.

Female science majors often struggle with their identity. “People often say to me that I am like a man,” Ms. Takaoka said. “But we are trained this way, to be logical and to find truths.”

Mayuko Fukushima, 22, a chemistry graduate student at Aoyama Gakuin University, said that after adjusting to a lab environment where men and women go about their research in the same way, she felt conflicted about how to present herself outside the classroom.

“When humanities girls visit the lab, I feel annoyed, but at the same time, I feel inferior” for not being seen as being as feminine, she said.

When she is out on the weekends, she enjoys what are seen as typical pursuits for a young woman. “I find it therapeutic when I am choosing girly clothes at stores and sending e-mails with cute characters.”

Hitomi Hayashibara, a graduate student of organic and synthetic chemistry at Tokyo Metropolitan University, said that having a higher degree in a scientific field could stand as a barrier to marriage, particularly if the man is seen as being less educated or of a lower social status. She has an understanding boyfriend but added that “I would think most men would not like that.”

Chisaki Yamada, a chemistry student at Aoyama Gakuin University, said that studying science felt natural to her, partly because her father and brother also studied science. She had an easy time befriending male colleagues because “we can both speak the common language, the language of logic.”

She makes a nod to her girlish side by pairing her white lab coat with pink sandals with polka-dotted bows. “It’s difficult to behave like a girl in the lab because you have to carry heavy equipment and stuff,” she said. “But wearing this makes me feel good. I get to express my femininity somehow.”

Attempts at raising the number of women come against legal barriers, underpinned by social mores and cultural forces. In 2010, faculty members of the Kyushu University mathematics department concluded that a more proactive admissions policy might be needed to recruit more women. The number of female students was only in the single digits, out of a student body of more than 50.

So the faculty decided to set up a quota. The first group of 45 students selected would be done regardless of gender. But, in the second group, the department would admit at least five women out of nine slots. Ultimately, that meant a quota that guaranteed a minimum of only 5 women in 54 total places.

But months after the announcement was made, calls and e-mails poured in criticizing what was seen as “reverse discrimination” and the breaking of the “equality before the law” principle, said Masanobu Kaneko, dean of the department.

“They claimed it would be unconstitutional, violating Article 14 that guaranteed equality of gender before the law,” he said. “We realized that this could lead to a lawsuit,” possibly by male applicants who failed to get in.

“If we lost the case, it could result in irrecoverable damage” to the school’s reputation and cause problems for those who were admitted, Dr. Kaneko said.

On the advice of lawyers and constitutional scholars, the faculty decided that they could lose such a lawsuit. Baffled, they gave up the idea.

“The notion of fairness here is different. People tend to think narrowly about it,” said Ms. Kawano of Yamagata University, adding that affirmative action programs might be necessary because “women are struggling against social discrimination.”

In the Japanese education system, girls in primary and middle school face little discrimination, experts said.

“Up to that level, students’ math scores are known to be about the same between boys and girls,” Dr. Kaneko said. Social considerations get into the way when they enter high school.

Kumiko Kushiyama, a professor of industrial art and systems design at Tokyo Metropolitan University, said that Japanese mothers still had much control over their daughters, with notions of what young women should or should not do.

That said, modern Japanese mothers — and society in general — are becoming more open-minded.

“Our female students are very energetic and doing great,” she said. “And they find good jobs.”